Rebecca MacKinnon's postings about work, reading, and ideas from 2004-2011.

November 16, 2011

Last month the U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk sent a letter to the Chinese government requesting information about its censorship practices. The middle kingdom’s response: a polite middle finger. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu declared that Chinese censorship follows “international practice.”

Her response is specious given that China operates the world’s most elaborate and opaque system of Internet censorship, as I describe in Chapter 3 of my forthcoming book. Yet Congress has been hard at work to bolster its legitimacy, however inadvertently. The reality is that the PROTECT IP Act now in the Senate, and a new House version called Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), would bring key features of China’s Great Firewall to America. Read my opinion piece in the New York Timesfor more details on how these bills would implement technical and legal solutions that would have the unfortunate result of making the Internet everywhere more like the Chinese Internet.

The House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on SOPA at 10am on Wednesday morning (a few hours from now). It will be webcast live on the committee website. The video should also be archived there after the event.

Opposition to SOPA is widespread, bipartisan, and international. The Center for Democracy and Technology is collecting links to blog posts, articles, as well as letters of opposition from human rights groups, Internet engineers, law professors, Internet companies, public interest advocates, consumer rights groups, among others. Allan Friedman at the Brookings Institution has an excellent paper explaining how SOPA and PROTECT IP will make the Internet less secure, sabotaging engineers' long-running efforts to increase the level of security in the global domain name system.

The New America Foundation (where I am a senior fellow) has signed an open letter to the House Judiciary Committee, along with a list of human rights, civil liberties and public interest groups. It argues:

We do not dispute that there are hubs of online infringement. But the definitions of the sites that would be subject to SOPA’s remedies are so broad that they would encompass far more than those bad actors profiting from infringement. By including all sites that may – even inadvertently – “facilitate” infringement, the bill raises serious concerns about overbreadth. Under section 102 of the bill, a nondomestic startup video-sharing site with thousands of innocent users sharing their own noninfringing videos, but a small minority who use the site to criminally infringe, could find its domain blocked by U.S. DNS operators. Countless non-infringing videos from the likes of aspiring artists, proud parents, citizen journalists, and human rights activists would be unduly swept up by such an action. Furthermore, overreach resulting from bill is more likely to impact the operators of smaller websites and services that do not have the legal capacity to fight false claims of infringement.

In Chapter 7 I describe my experience testifying at a March 2010 House Foreign Relations Committee hearing chaired by Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA). Berman happens to be one of SOPA’s key sponsors. While the hearing’s stated purpose was to discuss Google’s decision to halt censorship in China and how the United States can support global Internet freedom, committee members devoted considerable time to chastising a Google executive for failing to sufficiently police uploads to YouTube for infringing content. By their standards, YouTube and other similar user-driven sites clearly fall short of SOPA’s requirements. As I point out in the book, The cognitive dissonance on display at that hearing highlighted an inconvenient reality: politicians throughout the democratic world are pushing for stronger censorship and surveillance by Internet companies to stop the theft of intellectual property. They are doing so in response to aggressive lobbying by powerful corporate constituents without adequate consideration of the consequences for civil liberties, and for democracy more broadly.

The public interest letter details some of those consequences:

Relying on an even broader definition of “site dedicated to theft of US property,” section 103 of SOPA creates a private right of action of breathtaking scope. Any rightsholder could cut off the financial lifeblood of services such as search engines, user-generated content platforms, social media, and cloud-based storage unless those services actively monitor and police user activity to the rightsholder’s satisfaction.

In my op-ed I conclude:

The potential for abuse of power through digital networks — upon which we as citizens now depend for nearly everything, including our politics — is one of the most insidious threats to democracy in the Internet age. We live in a time of tremendous political polarization. Public trust in both government and corporations is low, and deservedly so. This is no time for politicians and industry lobbyists in Washington to be devising new Internet censorship mechanisms, adding new opportunities for abuse of corporate and government power over online speech. While American intellectual property deserves protection, that protection must be won and defended in a manner that does not stifle innovation, erode due process under the law, and weaken the protection of political and civil rights on the Internet.

I am not against copyright or intellectual property protection - I'm about to publish a copyrighted book. I hope that people will buy it. Its quality owes a great deal to the editors and other professionals whose job it was to help me shape and refine my argument, and to improve my prose. But I don't believe that the defense of my copyright should come at the expense of civil liberties. It is a moral imperative for democracies to find new and innovative ways to protect copyright in the Internet age without stifling the ability of citizens around the world to exercise their right to freedom of speech and assembly on the Internet.

November 01, 2011

There has been a steady stream of headlines recently about the use of Western surveillance technology by repressive regimes. After the hacktivist group Telecomixexposed the use by Syria of filtering and surveillance devices manufactured by the California-based company Blue Coat last month, the company has finally acknowledged that at least thirteen of its devices are being used by Syria.

Today, The Guardian has an amazing article titled "Governments turn to hacking techniques for surveillance of citizens." It describes the annual Intelligence Support Systems (ISS) World Americas conference, at which surveillance firms share tips on the latest "lawful interception" techniques used to spy on citizens. The companies showed little concern for how this technology can be and is being abused around the world. An excerpt:

Jerry Lucas, the president of the company behind ISS World, TeleStrategies, does not deny surveillance developers that attend his conference supply to repressive regimes. In fact, he is adamant that the manufacturers of surveillance technology, such as Gamma International, SS8 and Hacking Team, should be allowed to sell to whoever they want.

"The surveillance that we display in our conferences, and discuss how to use, is available to any country in the world," he said. "Do some countries use this technology to suppress political statements? Yes, I would say that's probably fair to say. But who are the vendors to say that the technology is not being used for good as well as for what you would consider not so good?"

Would he be comfortable in the knowledge that regimes in Zimbabwe and North Korea were purchasing this technology from western companies? "That's just not my job to determine who's a bad country and who's a good country. That's not our business, we're not politicians … we're a for-profit company. Our business is bringing governments together who want to buy this technology."

The EFF has proposed a two-part "know your customer" framework for surveillance equipment:

Companies selling surveillance technologies to governments need to affirmatively investigate and "know your customer" before and during a sale. We suggest something for human rights similar to what most of these companies are already required to do under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the export regulations for other purposes, and

Companies need to refrain from participating in transactions where their "know your customer" investigations reveal either objective evidence or credible concerns that the technologies provided by the company will be used to facilitate human rights violations.

Click here for further details. One of the broader problems, of course, is that the market for ever-more sophisticated surveillance equipment feeds unaccountable abuses of power not only by authoritarian regimes but also by democratic governments.

As long as engineers and companies claim to have no responsibility for the political context in which their inventions and products are used, the problem is going to grow worse. This problem has been exacerbated in the Internet age, but it has been around a lot longer. In a talk I gave last week at the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference, I played a video clip from Tom Lehrer's early 1960's song about ex-Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun:

July 09, 2010

After a week of mixed signals and speculation (see previous blog post), the Chinese government has decided to renew Google's web license.

While a number of commentators are interpreting this as a "climbdown" or "wimp out" by Google, I don't understand how they have reached that conclusion. As I pointed out last week, the only thing that has changed since March is that after typing "google.cn" into the browser's address bar and hitting "return," users have to make one extra click before reaching the uncensored google.com.hk. While the google.cn page now includes links to music, translation, and shopping services, the search box you see there on the page is just a static image that takes you immediately to google.com.hk as soon as you click on it. If you have grade school literacy in Chinese it's extremely obvious from looking at that page that if you want to search anything other than music or shopping you can simply click through to google.com.hk. I don't see how adding the extra click prevents users of Google's general search from using the service any more than the direct redirection from google.cn to google.com.hk which Google implemented in March. Of course, if you are searching from inside China and don't know that you can add an "s" to the "http:" in the address box and avail yourself of the "https" encrypted function that make your searches invisible to the Chinese network operators, searches on politically sensitive terms will get blocked by the Great Firewall. But that has been true since the redirection began. It hasn't changed. So Google's change implemented last week has no substantive impact on what Chinese Internet users can or cannot access via google.cn.

The change has, however, brought them into technical compliance with the regulations. And the authorities - for whatever reason - have decided that this change is sufficient despite the fact that in spirit Google is no closer to compliance with their wishes than it was in late March.

Since Chinese regulators don't confide in me personally I can only speculate on their motivations. It seems that the pragmatists have prevailed over the ideologues in this case. If Google's web license were to be denied, Google would be shut out of China completely. That sends a very negative message to the international business community, which is already concerned about China's politicized business environment. Questions would be raised about barriers to trade. The problem could be taken to the governmental level at a time when the last thing the U.S. and China need is more cause for tension. Now that Google.cn is in technical legal compliance and the uncensored search engine has been taken offshore out of mainland Chinese jurisdiction to Hong Kong where it is perfectly legal, it's better for Chinese regulators to declare victory and allow Google to pursue business activities in China that do not run afoul of Chinese regulations: R&D, advertising sales, mobile operating platforms, etc.

Another reason why it's in China's interest to let Google engage in China despite its resistance to censorship has to do with China's long term strategy for economic competitiveness and innovation. As the recent government white paper on the Internet made clear, Internet and mobile services are a core component of China's strategy for success as a global economic powerhouse. Keeping out foreign competition might be good for Chinese companies in the short term, but not in the long term. If Chinese companies are going to compete with the world's most innovative companies, they're not going to succeed if they're sheltered from competition in their home market because the domestic business environment is excessively political. I know that many influential CEO's of China's most successful Internet and telecoms companies certainly believe that an over-insulated market is not good for their businesses in the long run. It is my impression that this point has been getting made, quietly, to people in the government over the past few months. This point of view has even managed to surface into the public domain here and there on the Internet. One of the most compelling examples were remarks made by Edward Tian, "the father of Chinese broadband" at an IT industry forum held in Shenzhen in late March soon after Google began redirecting google.cn to google.com.hk. Tian said (translated by Luke Habberstad at China Digital Times):

You ask: who is the winner? Is Li Yanhong (co-founder of Baidu) the winner? This is hard to say. After Google left, many angry youth in our country said this was good. However, Google is also China’s best tool for understanding the West. In order to make the West understand the achievements of China’s reform and opening, many have to search through Google. Baidu maybe needs 10 or 20 more years before it can be acceptable to the Internet users of the West. It is possible that our reform and opening has lost a great tool for external publicity. We have to consider a question from two sides.

The second problem. Google is not just for searching. Google represents the future of information technology, since the Google search engine and Google cloud computing [support IT technology] behind the scenes. When we make this sort of company such a big rival, are we not also rejecting these technologies? Let us consider the accomplishments we have now achieved with a modernized core attitude. They came precisely from having an open mind. We brought over the Western invention of mobile communication and the Western invention of photo-communication, and took the title of being the nation with the largest telecommunications company in the world (China Mobile), thus achieving a leap in development. In the future, software technology might emerge in a form that uses Google services. Can we simply follow one sentence from Comrade Lenin and then throw the baby out with the bath water? We need to consider these questions.

Perhaps the people who approved Google's license found such arguments convincing, and in this case chose the long-term economic interests of the Chinese people over victory in one small skirmish.

On Google's part, they retain a foothold in the Chinese market while remaining true to their January pledge that they would no longer censor their Chinese search engine. And yes, I ran some tests today with politically sensitive Chinese-language terms on Google.com.hk. The results were not identical to Google.com because all the local Google search engines favor local content more heavily (thus results are not the same on Google.fr, Google.de, or Google.jp vs Google.com either). But I found no evidence of political censorship. For example: in a search for the Chinese language words for "Tiananmen square massacre" Google.com.hk returns all kinds of material containing details of June 4th 1989 carnage including graphic videos at the top of the video search.

Some commentators are slamming Google for capitulating because the company wants to remain engaged in China at all. Frankly I don't think that the cause of freedom and openness in China would be well served if all Western Internet companies pulled out of China completely. I don't believe its a simple matter of all-in or all-out, engage or disengage, with nothing in between. What's important is how you engage. Are your business practices, products and services helping to move things in a more open direction? Or are you collaborating with the surveillance and jailing of dissidents and providing cover and legitimacy to the world's most sophisticated censorship system? I believe it can be possible to engage in China while upholding core principles on free expression and privacy. To say that it isn't easy is a massive understatement. I'm not saying Google has always done everything right or that they won't make mistakes in the future - in China or elsewhere. But I am hopeful that they will continue find it in their global, long-term business interest to try to do the right thing, correct their mistakes and acknowledge wrongdoing when that happens, and continue to work with activists and socially responsible investors to prove that principled engagement is not only possible, but necessary.

June 29, 2010

In his latest blog post, Google's Chief Legal Officer David Drummond reports that Chinese authorities aren't happy with the automatic redirection of Google.cn to Hong Kong. They are threatening not to renew Google's Internet Content Provider license, which is required to legally operate any kind of Internet business in China. In an attempt to thread the legal needle, Drummond says Google.cn will now lead to a landing page which - if you click anywhere on that page - takes the user to the uncensored Google.com.hk. This is Google's convoluted way of adjusting Google.cn so that it remains technically in compliance with Chinese law while still sending Chinese users to an uncensored site. Now they just have to click through an extra page to get to the results.

It's unclear whether this will be acceptable to the Chinese authorities. It really depends on how secure or insecure they're feeling these days. In the meantime, the new landing page is a signal to Chinese users that they may want to remember Google.com.hk just in case Google.cn ceases to work, or update their browser bookmark.

What will happen next? Any one of four scenarios is possible:

1. The Chinese government renews Google's ICP license and Google.com.hk remains unblocked. Google.cn remains just a landing page which sends users to Google.com.hk when they click anywhere on the page. While Google.com.hk remains unblocked, though specific searches containing sensitive words will continue to be blocked. Nothing has changed except that users have to click through an extra page before they can start searching.

2. The Chinese government renews Google's ICP license but blocks Google.com.hk. People can get to the landing page via Google.cn, but after clicking on it they get an error message in their browser. Users who don't know how to use circumvention tools will no longer be able to continue accessing Google's uncensored search (unless they know to go to Google.com which as of now, I believe, remains unblocked).

3. The Chinese government does not renew Google's ICP license but does not block Google.com.hk. Google.cn will no longer work. Chinese Internet users will be able to access Google.com.hk if they happen know enough to type a different URL into their browser.

4. The Chinese government does not renew Google's ICP license and also blocks Google.com.hk. In this case, users will only be able to access the Hong Kong-based uncensored search if a) they know about the Google.com.hk URL and b) know how to use proxy servers or circumvention tools.

Which one do you predict? Let me know in the comments section if you'd like.

I begin by describing China's recent political innovation which I call networked authoritarianism. I then explain how the private sector in general - and Baidu in particular - fits into this system. I discuss the impact of Google's withdrawal from China, then conclude with some comments about the role of U.S. investment. Here is my conclusion:

The question is: Even as government censorship requirements grow increasingly onerous, dominant players solidify and expand their market positions at the expense of smaller upstarts, and the frustration of many Chinese Internet executives grows, will anybody in the Chinese business community dare to challenge the government policies and practices that have caused this situation? Or will they continue to feel that they have no choice if they want to continue making money?

As I have described in my testimony, the Chinese government has transferred much of the cost of censorship to the private sector. The American investment community has so far been willing to fund Chinese innovation in censorship technologies and systems without complaint or objection. Under such circumstances, Chinese industry leaders have little incentive and less encouragement to resist government demands that often contradict even China’s own laws and constitution.

Two of Baidu’s five Directors are American. U.S. investors provided much of Baidu’s startup capital. U.S. institutional investors own significant stakes in the company.To be fair, American investment dollars support many businesses around the world that human rights groups and environmentalists have identified as unethical or destructive to our health and our planet. Yet in the wake of the financial crisis and the BP oil spill, it is also clear that millions of people around the world are paying an unacceptably high price for unethical – or at very least amoral – investment practices. We will not see the end of our problems unless industry and investors own up to their broader responsibilities to society and to the planet. I predict that the prospects for freedom and democracy around the world will similarly be diminished if our investments continue to support censorship and surveillance.

For the ethical investor, there are two possible responses to this problem. One is divestment from all ethically challenging situations. The other is engagement and advocacy, using financial leverage to work for positive change in industry practices and even government regulation. Such efforts often require patience and take time to bear fruit, but experience in other sectors such as mining and manufacturing show that proactive, socially responsible investment combined with advocacy and engagement can make a difference over time.

I believe the Chinese people would be worse off if all American companies and investors were to abandon the Chinese Internet. Investors who remain silent, however, should be clear about what kind of innovation they are financing. In addition to whatever product or service they set out to invest in, they are also supporting a disturbing new political innovation: networked authoritarianism.

June 15, 2010

The release of the Chinese government's first-ever White Paper on the Internet in China provoked some head-scratching here in the Western world. Part Three of the six-part document is titled "Guaranteeing Citizens' Freedom of Speech on the Internet." I've heard from several journalists and policy analysts (not people based in China, for whom such cognitive dissonance is normal) who at first glance thought they were reading The Onion or some kind of parody site. How, people asked me, can a government that so blatantly censors the Internet claim with a straight face to be protecting and upholding freedom of speech on the Internet? The answer of course is that China's netizens are free to do everything... except for the things they're not free to do. The list of the latter, outlined in the next section titled Protecting Internet Security is long, vague, and subject to considerable interpretation:

...The Chinese government attaches great importance to protecting the safe flow of Internet information, actively guides people to manage websites in accordance with the law and use the Internet in a wholesome and correct way. The Decision of the National People's Congress Standing Committee on Guarding Internet Security, Regulations on Telecommunications of the People's Republic of China and Measures on the Administration of Internet Information Services stipulate that no organization or individual may produce, duplicate, announce or disseminate information having the following contents: being against the cardinal principles set forth in the Constitution; endangering state security, divulging state secrets, subverting state power and jeopardizing national unification; damaging state honor and interests; instigating ethnic hatred or discrimination and jeopardizing ethnic unity; jeopardizing state religious policy, propagating heretical or superstitious ideas; spreading rumors, disrupting social order and stability; disseminating obscenity, pornography, gambling, violence, brutality and terror or abetting crime; humiliating or slandering others, trespassing on the lawful rights and interests of others; and other contents forbidden by laws and administrative regulations.

Other than that, people are totally free. What's more, the use of the Internet by the people to "supervise" public officials is praised. As long as - in the process of said supervision - state power is not subverted, "state honor" is not jeopardized, nobody is humiliated or slandered, and no "rumors" are spread. The rise of Twitter-like microblogging services is even praised. (Twitter itself is blocked by the "great firewall," though tens of thousands of Chinese Internet users are believed to access it anyway through third-party clients and circumvention tools).

As I've frequently pointed out in the past (see here, here and here for starters), blocking of foreign websites like Twitter is just the top layer of Chinese Internet censorship. Beneath the "great firewall of China" is a sophisticated system by which censorship is delegated to the private sector. The first company to set up a Chinese Twitter-clone was a startup called Fanfou. Last June they got shut down because they failed to police the service adequately: users apparently shared too much content that violated the above no-no list. Other micro-blog services have since emerged. One run by the People's Daily and another by the popular web portal Sina.com. They seem to have learned from Fanfou's troubles and have put aggressive censorship systems in place. As Chen Tong, Sina's head editor, recently commented at a 3G Wireless Industry Summit: "controlling content in Sina microblogs is a problem which is a very big headache." (The Shanghaiist blog reports that the Sina.com news article reporting Chen's comments has itself been censored, but not before getting quoted and reported around the Internet.) According to the Sina.com account of his remarks, Chen went on to describe Sina's microblog-censorship strategy in some detail: 24-7 policing; constant coordination between the editorial department and the "monitoring department" (all social networking companies in China must have one of those in order to stay in compliance with government expectations); daily meetings; and systems through which both editors and users are constantly reporting problematic content.

Even so, Chen Tong says in his speech that microblogging has been tremendously empowering in China. He says that micro-blogs have become "people's personal web portals" and that a lot of recent incidents that have generated widespread public concern first emerged on microblogs.

Despite all the policing and the round-the-clock censorship, Chinese Internet users still feel much more empowered to participate in public discourse and even bring issues to national attention than they ever could have imagined in the past. (See Guobin Yang's excellent book, The Power of the Internet in China for many examples.) As I described it to one journalist, it's as if a bird that has lived in a cage all its life (one which has been gradually upgraded, with steadily improving food and which is much cleaner than it used to be) suddenly gets released into a large atrium. The bird is likely to feel excited and empowered for quite some time and may not realize that even broader freedom is possible or even desirable: after all, without the atrium walls might she get lost and starve? Or get eaten by other birds? There are plenty of security arguments in favor of supporting the atrium's legitimacy and necessity; there are even ethical justifications.

Thus China is pioneering what I call "networked authoritarianism." Compared to classic authoritarianism, networked authoritarianism permits – or shall we say accepts the Internet’s inevitable consequences and adjusts – a lot more give-and-take between government and citizens than in a pre-Internet authoritarian state. While one party remains in control, a wide range of conversations about the country’s problems rage on websites and social networking services. The government follows online chatter, and sometimes people are even able to use the Internet to call attention to social problems or injustices, and even manage to have an impact on government policies. As a result, the average person with Internet or mobile access has a much greater sense of freedom – and may even feel like they have the ability to speak and be heard – in ways that weren’t possible under classic authoritarianism. It also makes most people a lot less likely to join a movement calling for radical political change. In many ways, the regime actually uses the Internet not only to extend its control but also to enhance its legitimacy.

At the same time, in the networked authoritarian state there is no guarantee of individual rights and freedoms. People go to jail when the powers-that-be decide they are too much of a threat – and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. Truly competitive, free and fair elections do not happen. The courts and the legal system are tools of the ruling party.

Connecting every citizen in China to the Internet via multiple devices might sound like something the Chinese Communist Party would want to avoid. Several people who contacted me about China's Internet White Paper were surprised at the Chinese government's enthusiasm for connectivity. Such enthusiasm does not jive with most American and European notions of how an authoritarian state would be run by a party that calls itself Communist. What's important to understand is that Chinese authoritarianism in the Internet age is not the same as the crumbling, centrally-planned authoritarianism of the Eastern Bloc, disconnected from the Western capitalist world.

The CCP leadership recognizes that they can’t control everybody all the time if they’re going to be a technologically advanced global economic powerhouse. What’s more, high Internet penetration is necessary if the Chinese government wants to continue high rates of economic growth, which economists agree requires boosting domestic consumer demand as well as pushing Chinese companies to the cutting edge of technological innovation.China catapulted itself to become the world’s second largest economy by turning itself into the world’s factory. But Chinese labor has grown expensive compared to some other markets in poorer countries. In order to stay competitive and keep growing, China needs to transition from a manufacturing-fueled economy to an economy fueled by domestic consumption at home, while being an innovator for advanced technologies and services that can compete with American and European companies.

Another component of the Chinese Communist Party’s survival strategy involves influencing the Internet’s technical evolution in ways that are most compatible with censorship and surveillance goals. China already has more Internet users than there are Americans on the planet. As the world’s biggest market for Internet technologies, it is starting to influence how these technologies evolve. The Internet is quickly morphing from something we’ve mainly used through our computers into a new, more mobile phase in which all devices, appliances and vehicles – from our phones to our cars to our refrigerators – will be connected to the network. The Chinese government is embracing this future. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao now gives speeches in which he waxes enthusiastic about the “Internet of things.” Chinese Internet and telecommunications companies receive substantial government support in hopes that they will lead the world in shaping the next generation of Internet technologies.

Beyond China, the fastest-growing markets for mobile Internet technologies are in Asia, the Middle East and Africa: exactly those parts of the world where authoritarian governments are most concentrated. Chinese telecommunications companies like Huawei and ZTE (the “Ciscos of China”) are already dominant in many African and Middle Eastern markets. They are building Internet and mobile networks in countries whose governments would prefer to have their systems built by Chinese engineers rather than by Americans.

Another thing that has puzzled some of the American journalists and analysts who contacted me is the Chinese government's assertion of its "sovereignty" on the Internet, given that the Internet is a globally inter-connected network and derives much of its value from the fact that borders are collapsed online. Yet at the same time, it's a physical reality that web sites have to be hosted physically on computers that are located in some jurisdiction or another; they are operated by physical human beings who reside under a government jurisdiction and can thus be physically controlled when necessary; they are operated by businesses that have to be registered in one or more jurisdiction and their physical operations are subject to government regulation; and the Internet runs on networks that physically exist within or pass through nation-states. The White Paper is a clear articulation of the Chinese government's long-standing position that nation-states should have "sovereignty" over all aspects of the Internet - human or equipment or signal - that reside within or pass through Chinese sovereign territory. Google is challenging this notion as it pushes the U.S. government to take action against China for violating WTO rules by using censorship as a barrier to trade. (For further discussion of China and Internet sovereignty see this Interview with Columbia University's Tim Wu conducted by The New Yorker's Evan Osnos.)

The White Paper also re-emphasizes the Chinese government's long-standing position that the global coordination tasks required to make the Internet function - what Internet policy wonks call "Internet governance" - are best left to governments, not private entities or companies or others. The White Paper did not condemn ICANN, the private non-profit which coordinates the Internet's domain name system - in fact it didn't even mention ICANN or other non-governmental organizations that coordinate the Internet's functions and anoint preferred global technical standards. Nor did it say anything negative about the "multi-stakeholder" governance approach currently favored by Western democracies, which includes non-governmental "civil society" organizations alongside governments and companies. But the document made clear China's position that " the UN should be given full scope in international Internet administration." As Brendan Kuerbis of the Internet Governance Project puts it, China is not intending to disengage from the existing Internet governance frameworks, but can be expected to exert its influence in shaping these frameworks in its preferred direction.

The White Paper's message is that the Chinese government is not running scared from the Internet. It is embracing the Internet head-on, intends to be a leader in its global evolution, and intends to assert its influence on how the global Internet is governed and regulated.

On a more optimistic note, the White Paper does have its domestic critics. Blogger, journalist and journalism professor Hu Yong argues (writing on a domestic blog which has not been censored) that most of the regulations governing the Chinese Internet have no clear basis in Chinese law and are arguably unconstitutional. "At a time when the Internet is raising a lot of questions that we don't have answers to," he writes, "the government may not have the best solutions. It's possible that the Internet could give birth to new forms of regulation that aren't as coercive, and which place greater trust in the strength of individual freedom and the self-governance of citizens." While the Internet does need to be regulated, he concludes, the public needs to participate in the creation of those regulations.

But as long as all of China's Internet companies and the few foreign Internet companies with a local presence in China continue to do whatever the government demands, no matter how little legal or constitutional legitimacy such demands might have, the government will have little incentive to accept the kind of change that Hu Yong envisions. Note that many of the big Chinese companies receive American investment dollars or are publicly traded on U.S. stock exchanges, sending a clear message that whatever U.S. elected officials might say about "Internet freedom," many American investors are quite happy to profit from China's status quo.

May 20, 2010

At the end of the Global VoicesSummit in Santiago, Chile earlier this month, Ethan Zuckerman and I led a session in which we asked everybody in the room to help answer a question: "How do we keep the Internet open and free?" In his blog post titled "How big is Internet freedom?" Ethan does a great job of summarizing the range of responses - and lack of agreement. In the room that day were a diverse group of people: activists, citizen-bloggers, journalists, civil liberties lawyers, educators, and academics, as well as people who work for foundations, companies, international organizations and governments. Not all of these people felt comfortable about being in the same room with some of the others, as Ethan's post reflects, and as others like Andrew from EngageMedia have also commented. Yet everybody was united by the fact that they characterize their work to be related in some way to one or all of six things:

working to shape laws and policies in a way that protects and facilitates people's ability to exercise their rights to free expression and assembly;

informing the public about threats by governments, companies, or others to online free expression and assembly through various forms of research and reporting;

educating the public about how to use technologies that can help us exercise our rights when they are threatened by censorship and surveillance;

providing financial support for one or more of the above.

Debate centered around the following issues:

Government involvement: Some activists were very uncomfortable about the fact that a young woman from the U.S. State Department, whose job is to work on "Internet freedom" issues, attended our public conference - a conference that was free for anybody who registered before we ran out of space. Global Voices Advocacy Director Sami Ben Gharbia, a Tunisian exile and grassroots activist, said he worries government money is poisoning the online activism space, causing grassroots causes to be hijacked or used by geopolitical actors who he feels are more interested in influencing the politics of certain countries in certain directions than in the welfare and safety of specific individuals on the ground. He is also concerned that U.S. government money, inspired by the Obama Administration's new "Internet freedom" agenda, means that activists in politically "sexy" countries like China and Iran get lots of support and attention, while the problems faced by activists in countries whose Internet repression is less well covered in the global English-language media, from Tunisia to Russia to Thailand to Syria, are largely ignored. A lively debate about this issue ensued, with Bob Boorstin of Google (who once worked as a speechwriter in the Clinton Administration) called Sami's position "paranoid" and pointed out that like it or not, governments are players in this space. This could be a good thing, he said, if it leads to greater honesty and transparency among all governments about how they are trying to regulate and control various online and mobile spaces. An activist from Brazil argued that taking an "us vs. them" stance towards government is "b.s." "We can't keep government out of the Internet because government is part of the Internet," he said. Certainly, those of us who are citizens of democracies need to push our governments to be consistent and transparent about what they are doing in this space. We have a responsibility to make sure that our tax money is not being spent in a counterproductive, hypocritical, or duplicitous manner. That much we owe to Sami and the vulnerable grassroots communities around the world that he works with.

Corporate-owned platforms and services: Both Google and Yahoo were active at the conference and helped to fund it, along with a number of foundations. Google - along with Reuters - also funded a new Breaking Borders award for individuals or groups doing extraordinary work to promote free expression online. Google is in constant friction with a range of governments - from democracies to autocracies - seeking to regulate its platforms in various ways. While Google's executives have made a commitment to do the socially responsible thing for reasons that are honorable, it's also true that it's in Google's corporate interest to align itself with the global online free speech movement as it faces regulatory battles around the world. As I reported in my last blog post, YouTube's Victoria Grand participated in a lively session dedicated to the human rights implications of content moderation. Yet a number of participants voiced concern about over-reliance on corporate-owned platforms and service providers. As Ethan put it in an important blog post back in March: "These entities have no more legal obligation to allow open, unfettered political speech in their spaces than shopping malls do to host political rallies."

Which brings us back to the issue of "netizenship." If we depend on commercial services and platforms for our expression and assembly online, then we have to stop acting like passive "users" and start acting like "citizens" of these spaces: organizing with others and pushing the companies to act in the public interest and to take free expression and human rights fully into account. Companies will only change their practices if they feel that their brand reputations and business success depend on it.

One could build open-source, non-profit, community administered web-hosting platforms, social networking services, and e-mail systems that would not depend on companies for the most part. Mozilla's Drumbeat movement aims to educate the broader public about non-proprietary and open source alternatives available out there - and seeks to build a robust "open web" that supports a thriving international community of content creators, programmers, and citizens who take responsibility for building and defending the Internet we want. Perhaps things will evolve in a manner similar to how, in many democracies, you have commercial media companies coexisting alongside non-profit public media funded by foundations and audience donations (and in some cases also government subsidies and tax money). In cyberspace both for-profit and non-profit spaces can coexist peacefully, each serving different needs of different kinds of people and communities. Society benefits from having both, as there are some social needs - and social groups - which companies may never have much interest in serving or respecting. The "open web" can also help to keep the commercial spaces honest.

This however still doesn't solve the problem of commercial carriers lower down in the stack: Internet Service Providers in many parts of the world are monopolies and we often have little choice about who provides our basic connectivity. One self-described "anarchist" from Brazil is working to build mesh networks that would enable people to access the Internet without going through a commercial ISP. If communities could create viable mesh networks as alternatives to commercial ISP's in cases where ISP's are non-existent, unreliable, or untrustworthy, that would be interesting, but it would require a great deal more public engagement and activism than we've seen anywhere thus far.

New rights or old rights? Do we need a new Bill of Rights for Cyberspace as Jeff Jarvis and others have suggested? In Brazil they've already drafted such a document, now up for public discussion and comment. (The CPJ's Danny O'Brien provides some critical analysis of that draft, which might actually provide justification for more takedown of content without judicial oversight or due process, in the name of protecting the rights of people who are slandered.) Or do we simply need to work hard to make sure that existing internationally recognized covenants, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights are fully applied to the Internet and upheld in both online and mobile spaces? A couple of efforts build on this idea. The Principles for corporate conduct developed by the Global Network Initiative are based on those existing international covenants. The Internet Governance Forum's Dynamic Coalition for Internet Rights and Principles is currently working on a document that seeks to elaborate on how existing human rights covenants should be applied by governments and companies to ICT's. That draft will be made public sometime over the summer. As a number of people at the Summit pointed out, most governments don't respect the existing rights covenants in "meatspace," and thus they're not terribly optimistic that such rights declarations will have much concrete impact. On the other hand, these U.N. documents are used by human rights activists worldwide as the moral baseline upon which to build their arguments against human rights violations. Documents clarifying how the UDHR and ICCPR should be applied to cyberspace might be helpful tools, but they are not going to lead to solutions in and of themselves.

Defining and coordinating goals across the global network This is the toughest part. Cyberspace is a global network. What people do on and to it in the U.S. or Pakistan or China can have a global impact. "Freedom" in the context of cyberspace - or in the context of human civilization - does not mean "free for all." Nor does it mean that we won't pay for anything, depsite what some in the entertainment industry may insinuate. We don't want cyberspace to be a Hobbesian state of nature in which life is "nasty, brutish, and short." This is why modern governments gain their legitimacy from the idea of a "social contract," in which we give up some of our freedoms to do anything we please for the sake of the greater social good, and if we are in a democracy those laws, rules, and enforcement institutions are formed with our consent and supervision. So how do we work out a global social contract for the civilization we are building in cyberspace?

Back in March after Google withdrew its search engine from China, British historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote a column in The Guardian about how we urgently need a global debate and a global consensus around the idea that "everyone should be free to see everything, except for that limited set of things which clear, explicit global rules specify should not be available." He concluded:

It's in the infosphere that the world is coming closest, fastest, to a global village, so it's the infosphere that most urgently needs a global debate about the village rules. If we don't have that debate, and have it soon, then what you get to see on your screen will be the result of a power struggle between the old-fashioned power of the state in which you happen to be, the new-style power of the giant information companies, the insurgent force of novel information technologies, and the ingenuity of individual netizens. That's a likely outcome, but not the best.

But it's hard to find consensus - even amongst liberal internationalists with different cultural and religious backgrounds - about how to find the right balance between our right to free expression and assembly and our right to privacy and security. Even trickier is the question of what is "hate speech" and what constitutes justified criticism or even satire of one religion by members of another. The Global Voices community has come together around a set of common values around freedom of expression and communication. Our Manifesto begins: "We believe in free speech: in protecting the right to speak — and the right to listen. We believe in universal access to the tools of speech." But all you need to do is to read this post about Pakistani reactions to the "Draw Mohammed Day" Facebook page, then read this post by another member of our community, to see how far we are from having a consensus about how civilized cross-cultural discourse should or shouldn't be managed on global Internet platforms.

Last August, Lisa Horner of Global Partners and Max Senges (then an academic, now at Google) published a paper titled Values, Principles, and Rights in Internet Governance, which called for a global, trans-cultural dialogue around two questions: • Can we maintain cultural diversity while at the same time agreeing to universal values to underpin internet governance?• Can we translate these values into practical guiding principles for different internet stakeholders, from the technical community through to regulators and users?

Looking at the world today, the answer would seem to be "No." But then we've not even attempted the kind of informed discourse that would be needed before ruling out "Yes" altogether.

Right now I see two fundamental obstacles to such a discourse. First, we don't have adequate global platforms on which to have such a multicultural discussion. As Global Voices continues to expand its multilingual translation community, and as we build capacity to translate conversations across different languages, maybe that could be a place to experiment.

Second, global publics don't have enough information to hold an informed discourse right now. People who follow global news and domestic politics in their home countries are not well informed about issues related to Internet governance, how software engineering and hardware design can affect our freedoms, how government regulations play out around the world, etc. Most news organizations cover technology as a business, cultural, and consumer phenomenon. Few journalists (I can count them on one hand) cover technology as a global political space. Very little technology journalism approaches stories with the goal of serving the interests of an informed global netizenry. We need global coverage of cyberspace as a new political space. This coverage needs to begin with questions like: "What do people need to know in order to be informed participants in shaping the future of our global network? What do people need to know in order to determine what their own interests are within the network, and to understand who and what is affecting those interests either negatively or positively? What do people need to know in order to figure out what kind of Internet they want? What do people need to know in order to understand and debate what is possible? What do people need to know about the players, institutions, companies, and politics so that they can figure out how they as citizens of the network can take action?" We need hard-hitting, original, investigative stories that help to fill this void. Perhaps it's time for somebody to create such a news organization.

March 25, 2010

"Fauna" at ChinaSMACK has done a valuable public service by hanging out in Chinese forums and translating netizen reaction to Google.cn's relocation to Hong Kong. Read the whole post here. Fauna observes that a lot of comments on the major Chinese web portals have been deleted, leaving up the ones most favorable to the Chinese government and most critical of Google. Keeping one step ahead of the censors - just to capture some of the more nuanced comments before they were deleted proved to be a challenge:

Many Chinese netizen comments have been deleted or hidden and most
comments that remain visible clearly support the government or are
critical of Google. You can see this in the translated comments from
NetEase above.

On KDS, a popular Shanghai BBS discussion forum, I was able to find
some comments in support of Google or critical of the government before
they were deleted. KDS moderators first deleted posts with many
replies before deleting the smaller posts with fewer replies. Many
posts were deleted while I was still collecting comments from them.

One of the comments Fauna caught before it disappeared was this one:

"Wumaoare rampant, they better secure their
overtime pay. What we need is the truth, how are sensitive terms
defined? What will not die is whatever TG [The Government] says, that
everything that it does not like are sensitive words, keeping the people
in the dark. "

The posting includes this cartoon, which doesn't really require translation:

Will Microsoft's Bing now be content to eat s**t alongside Baidu? Or will they make a serious effort to improve the nutritional value of the Chinese Internet? I asked that question in a column for CNN.com yesterday.

Google has officially announced its withdrawal from the China market.
This is a high-impact incident. It has triggered netizens’
discussions which are not limited to a commercial level. Therefore
please pay strict attention to the following content requirements
during this period:

A. News Section

1. Only use Central Government main media (website) content; do not
use content from other sources
2. Reposting must not change title
3. News recommendations should refer to Central government main media
websites
4. Do not produce relevant topic pages; do not set discussion sessions;
do not conduct related investigative reporting;
5. Online programs with experts and scholars on this matter must apply
for permission ahead of time. This type of self-initiated program
production is strictly forbidden.
6. Carefully manage the commentary posts under news items.

B. Forums, blogs and other interactive media sections:

1. It is not permitted to hold discussions or investigations on the
Google topic
2. Interactive sections do not recommend this topic, do not place this
topic and related comments at the top
3. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which
attack the Party, State, government agencies, Internet policies with the
excuse of this event.
4. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which
support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer
for Google and others have a different tune from government policy
5. On topics related to Google, carefully manage the information in
exchanges, comments and other interactive sessions
6. Chief managers in different regions please assign specific manpower
to monitor Google-related information; if there is information about
mass incidents, please report it in a timely manner.

We ask the Monitoring and Control Group to immediately follow up
monitoring and control actions along the above directions; once any
problems are discovered, please communicate with respected sessions in a
timely manner.

March 23, 2010

Tomorrow the Congressional Executive China Commission will conduct a hearing titled Google and Internet Control in China: A Nexus Between Human Rights and Trade? They had originally invited me to testify in a similarly titled hearing, "China, the Internet and Google," which was postponed and rescheduled twice: the first attempt was foiled by the Great Snowcalypse; the second attempt scheduled for March 1st was postponed again at the last minute for some reason that isn't entirely clear. Meanwhile I had already gone and written my testimony. When they rescheduled the hearing they said I was no longer invited, as they wanted the hearing to have different witnesses from recent related hearings in both the House and Senate. Given that I appeared in both hearings it seems reasonable that they'd want to hear from some other people.

Since I put some effort into my testimony, however, and since it drills down in a lot more detail on China than my testimony for the other hearings, I think there is some value in my sharing it with the world.

WEDNESDAY MORNING UPDATE: A Commission staffer just called me to say that they had meant to contact me about including the written testimony in the hearing's official record, but that the email somehow had not been sent. They now plan to distribute copies of it at the hearing and may quote from it during the proceedings.Click here for the updated PDF or click here for the web version. Some highlights:

From the introduction:

China is pioneering a new kind of Internet-age authoritarianism. It is demonstrating how a non-democratic government can stay in power while simultaneously expanding domestic Internet and mobile phone use.In China today there is a lot more give-and-take between government and citizens than in the pre-Internet age, and this helps bolster the regime’s legitimacy with many Chinese Internet users who feel that they have a new channel for public discourse. Yet on the
other hand, as this Commission’s 2009 Annual Report clearly outlined, Communist Party control over the bureaucracy and courts has strengthened over the past
decade, while the regime’s institutional commitments to protect the universal rights and freedoms of all its citizens have weakened.

Google’s public complaint about Chinese cyber-attacks and censorship occurred against this backdrop.It reflects a recognition that China’s status quo – at least when it comes to censorship, regulation,and manipulation of the Internet – is unlikely to improve any time soon, and
may in fact continue to get worse.

Overview of Chinese Internet controls

Chinese government attempts to control online speech began in the late 1990’s with a focus on the filtering or “blocking” of Internet content. Today, the government deploys an expanding repertoire of tactics.

In other words, filtering is just one of many ways that the Chinese government limits and controls speech on the Internet. The full text then gives descriptions and explanations of the other tactics, but in brief they include:

deletion or removal of content at the source

device and local-level controls

domain name controls

localized disconnection or restriction

self-censorship due to surveillance

cyber-attacks

government "astro-turfing" and "outreach"

targeted police intimidation

I then describe a number of efforts by Chinese netizens to push back against these tactics, which include (see the full text for further explanation):

informal anti-censorship support networks

distributed web-hosting assistance networks

crowdsourced "opposition research"

preservation and redistribution of censored content

humorous "viral" protests

public persuasion efforts

I end with a set of recommendations. Once again, see the full text for explanations, but here is the basic list:

anti-censorship tools - including outreach and education in their use

anonymity and security tools - to help people better defend against cyber-attacks, spyware, and surveillance

platforms and networks for the capture, storage, and redistribution of content that gets deleted from domestic social networking and publishing services

support for "opposition research" - remember the Chinese netizens who deconstructed Green Dam?

corporate responsibility - see Global Network Initiative, but also appropriate legislation if American and other Western Internet companies fail to accept the idea that they have some obligations as far as free expression and privacy are concerned

private right of action - so that Chinese victims can sue U.S. companies in U.S. courts

incentives for innovation by the private sector that helps Chinese Internet users access blocked sites as well as protect themselves from attacks and surveillance.

My conclusion:

Many of China’s 384 million Internet users are engaged in passionate debates about their communities’ problems, public policy concerns, and their nation’s future. Unfortunately these public discussions are skewed, blinkered, and manipulated – thanks to political censorship and surveillance. The Chinese people are proud of their nation’s achievements and generally reject critiques by outsiders even if they agree with some of them. A democratic alternative to China’s Internet-age authoritarianism will only be viable if it is conceived and built by the Chinese people from within. In helping Chinese “netizens” conduct an un-manipulated and un-censored discourse about their future, the United States will not imposing its will on the Chinese people, but rather helping the Chinese people to take ownership over their own future.

March 22, 2010

China's insomniac twitterati were on fire this afternoon U.S. time, powered no doubt by much caffeine and sugar in the the wee hours of the morning in China. Half an hour before Google's
David Drummond posted his announcement that Google.cn is now
effectively operating from Google.com.hk, Guangzhou-based open source
programmer @LEMONed broke the
news that google.cn was being redirected to the Hong Kong service. Reacting to the news, @wentommy quipped: "One Google, One World; One China, No Google."

As of now (still early morning in Beijing), Google.com.hk is accessible from mainland China although specific search results for sensitive terms result in a browser error - or in other words, are blocked. Same as it's always been for sensitive searches on Google.com from inside mainland China. This is network filtering and would happen automatically as part of the "great firewall" Internet filtering system.

The ball is now in the Chinese government's court in two ways:

1) Whether they will block all of google.com.hk, which until now has not been blocked. If they are smart they will just leave the situation as is and stop drawing media attention to their censorship practices. The longer this high profile fracas goes on, the greater Chinese Internet users awareness will be about the lengths to which their government goes to blinker their knowledge of the world. That may inspire more people to start learning how to use circumvention tools for getting around the censorship. Chinese censorship is only effective if a large percentage of the population isn't very conscious of what they're missing. As I like to explain it: if you're born with tunnel vision you assume it's normal until somehow you're made aware that life without tunnel vision is both possible and much better. The longer this story remains in the headlines, the more people will become conscious of their tunnel vision and think about ways to eliminate it.

2) Whether they allow Google to retain its ad sales and R&D businesses in China. Google has now removed the part of the business that might have defied Chinese law, relocating it to a jurisdiction where websites are not required to censor political speech. The remaining parts of Google's business should be able to operate within the confines of Chinese law without much problem. If the Chinese government is smart, they will declare victory for having forced Google to back down and remove its potentially illegal operation from their jurisdiction. They should say they welcome all foreign law-abiding businesses and look forward to working with Google as long as it abides by Chinese law. If they punish Google further for events of the past few months, that will further feed the anxiety of a foreign business community who have already been complaining of unfair and politicized treatment, and it will cause the U.S.-China business and trade relationship to deteriorate further in ways that I would think are not in China's interest - certainly not in the Chinese people's interest.

As it so happens, I interviewed David Drummond on December 15th for the Index on Censorship, but due to the magazine's long production time they're just publishing it now, with an update that we did with him via e-mail after the January 12th announcement. They've posted it online today. I think a lot of it remains very relevant.

UPDATE1: For journalists trying to get their heads around this story Andrew Lih has an excellent primer on the basic facts and background you need to know.

UPDATE2: The Chinese government is reacting in a knee-jerk and counterproductive manner which implies that they think they should have jurisdiction over websites hosted on computer servers physically beyond their borders, and which implies disrespect for the Hong Kong Basic Law to which the CCP made a clear commitment. See Reuters for the text of the Chinese official comments on Google.

ADDENDUM: Here's the post I wrote in 2006 when Google went into China with Google.cn: Google in China: degrees of evil final conclusion: "At the end of the day, this compromise puts Google a little lower on the
evil scale than many other internet companies in China. But is this
compromise something Google should be proud of? No. They have put a foot
further into the mud. Now let's see whether they get sucked in deeper
or whether they end up holding their ground."

March 21, 2010

Some Chinese netizens who feel caught between Google and their government have written an open letter to "relevant Chinese government ministries and Google Inc." It's got a
very long preamble which I hope somebody will take the time to translate in full. [MONDAY NOONTIME UPDATE: A full translation has now been completed here.] In a nutshell, it expresses the view that Chinese Internet users have been left in the dark. While it's
assumed that the Chinese government would seek to keep its people in the
dark - hence its censorship in the first place - they find it unfair that Google has not provided them with enough information to
form educated and fact-based opinions about what's going on. The authors raise a list of questions they want answered (corrections to my rough translation welcome in the comments section):

Did Google meet the requirements of Chinese law in censoring material related to porn, violence, and gambling?

How were the Chinese government's censorship demands communicated to Google? From which ministry? According to what legal processes? Were there any mechanisms for correcting mistakes or channels for appeal?

What content did the Chinese government require Google to self-censor? Aside from sex, violence and gambling, what else was included? How was the censorship decided for topics such as mining disasters, the brick kiln slave children, Yilishen, violent evictions, Sanlu milk powder, Deng Yujiao, the governor's confiscation of a journalist's recorder, the Shanxi vaccine scandal, and other incidents? We cannot accept violation of the public's right to access such public interest information.

When it comes to activities by government leaders and ministries that violate the constitution and the laws beneath it, is it necessary to carry out unconstitutional censorship?

Why can't the Internet industry, including Google, Baidu, and ICT companies accept public supervision and resolve the content regulation problem in an open manner? Including but not limited to cooperation with an independent third-party citizens' body?

What is the status of talks between Google and the Chinese government? What problems have been discussed? Cannot the irreconcilable positions of each side be clearly revealed to the public?

If Google.cn were to no longer exist, or if China were to further block other Google services, has the Chinese government considered how their blocking of foreign websites and censorship of domestic websites violates Chinese citizens' right to scientific, educational, environmental, clean energy and other information? How will this loss be lessened or compensated for?

The letter concludes with several statements about censorship. "We support necessary censorship of Internet content and communications, whether it is on Google or any other foreign or domestic company," the authors write. "But we hope that such censorship should be conducted as follows:"

It should be based on clear laws, the related regulations and censorship procedures should not violate China's constitution and laws. Vague censorship standards result in over-censorship or make it impossible to self-censor.

Pre-censorship should not be carried out, as the right to free expression as guaranteed by the Chinese constitution and laws must not be violated.

The procedures must be transparent, with clear and distinct censorship processes and steps. The censorship must be carried out by a clearly specified government department. It shouldn't be so vague that it is carried out by "relevant departments" which the public cannot locate.

There should be a channel for appeals by netizens and by companies so that anybody who objects to a particular act of censorship can obtain reconsideration or file suit. Chinese legal bodies should clearly designated a channel for redress.

The Chinese people's attention to and discourse about matters of public concern must not be obstructed. The public's right to study, scientific inquiry, communication, and commercial activity must not be inhibited.

On Saturday the Washington Post's John Pomfret reported poignantly about Chinese netizens' angst over the potential loss of Google. Everything I've been hearing from my own friends and contacts certainly backs up his story. But I'm also hearing from many people that the "Google China incident" - as many Chinese call it - has greatly heightened awareness among normally apolitical Chinese Internet users about the extent of Internet censorship in their country. It has sparked a lot of debate and soul searching about the extent to which their government is causing them to be isolated from the rest of the world.

The letter above also shows that this incident has sparked a debate among Chinese digerati about how Internet companies should be held accountable not only to - but by - the public.

Google executives never responded to Chinese blogger Isaac Mao's open letter to them in 2007, offering the help and advice of Chinese netizens on how to do good and avoid doing evil in China. Given that the Chinese government is unlikely to respond to this latest letter, and given that its authors have taken a risk to speak out, I hope that Google will demonstrate that it truly does care about Chinese netizens and answer their questions.